Search diary entries for food

2

Comments

  • You can tell when a dev team doesnt use their own product. They don't understand the things that are most important.

    Their goal is to get new members, not to service the needs of all of the people who have already paid.

  • Yes, please add this function!

  • @CalorieGuru Yeah, I think that is the point. The product manager probably don't use it, that's why he doesn't understand the needs of the customers. Too bad.

  • edited April 2021

    Maybe the priorities are completely different and we just don't get it? I see that the most active thread in the Beta forum is about the recipe importer. None of the bugs as reported as a beta tester, has even received an acknowledgement from @Aaron or @BrendanB / @brendanbenson1.

    As a software engineer, I can tell that such a complex feature is hard to implement, and prone to all sorts of errors. As a Cronometer user, I have trouble seeing it utility, vs. the development effort, number of users who'd use it, and frequency of use.

    In my opinion, development resources would be far better invested in more pressing issues (bugs, major missing features) that affect all Cronometer customers all the time.

  • @Lector Apparently the priorities are different, otherwise this feature would have been implemented a long time ago.

    I am also a software developer and can't confirm, that it is a difficult feature (in general) :-) Of course, I have no clue, how the software architecture looks like, so maybe for them it is actually difficult.

    Of course, we don't know how actually ALL customers think about this. Maybe this feature is actually not so super important for most of the users here. Everyone can of course speak only for himself. For me personally, this features is super important, to make sense of all of my data, I am collecting through a lot of third party services and gadgets.

    In the end, we cannot force any change here. We have to wait and see, what will be eventually implemented over time.

  • edited April 2021

    @phreeksta

    I am also a software developer and can't confirm, that it is a difficult feature (in general) :-)

    Do you mean you don't think a recipe importer is a difficult feature to implement? Or were you referring to another feature (Search?), since you wrote below,

    For me personally, this features is super important, to make sense of all of my data, I am collecting through a lot of third party services and gadgets.

    What is "this features"[sic] ?

    To clarify, what I'm saying is:

    1. I'm a beta tester. I've spent time carefully reporting several bugs in the Beta forum, with detailed screencasts or reproduction stemps. Nobody from the Cronometer team has replied to me so far. I feel I've been wasting my time.

    2. Instead, team seems focused on the Recipe Importer feature. I think a recipe importer is a complex feature, because recipes don't always come in a standard format, ingredients can be phrased in a myriad of ways, quantities can be expressed in various units etc. Parsing recipes correctly requires Natural-Language Understanding. This is not easy. When I worked on AMP at Google, we advocated for publishers (I worked with AllRecipes.com in particular) to use the Schema.org Recipe type, but as you can imagine, not all recipes published online are in that format.

    3. My suspicion above is proven right by the team abandoning the recipe importer feature in the latest build a few days ago.

    4. I personally think the recipe importer requires a lot of development and testing effort, but offers little use to few customers rarely, compared to far simpler bugs to fix that affect everyone all the time.

  • @Lector Yeah, I think we are talking about different features :-) I meant the search or at least, have the ability to choose a food and see, when I ate it in the past.

    I don't know anything about the Recipe Importer feature, but from what you've wrote, it seems definitely tricky!

    1. That is tough and disappointing! I also beta tested a lot of stuff over the years and I know that feeling. If you put in a lot of time, but the app creator just doesn't seem to care, it is just disheartening.
  • What we have h ere is a product that the developers don't use themselves, because if they did they's know how patently ridiculous is it to not have a search feature.

  • It isn’t ridiculous. Just very helpful to have that search option! How rude!

  • which other database focused paid product doesn't have a basic search feature? We have time.

  • Well, minus the ridicule, do you know of similar websites/apps that does offer this very-much-wanted search feature?

  • I asked you to name one, since you don't think it's ridiculous.

  • I see this feature has been requested for quite a long time, is there any progress on it? Having used Cronometer long enough now that there are far too many previous days to scroll through to find something manually, my need for this feature is becoming more pressing.

    One reason I'd particularly like this feature is because over time I've come to realise there are certain foods I've entered in the past where I chose the wrong quantity (for instance I used a volume measurement, then later when I weighed the food I found the volume measurement was wildly different to mine - fresh herbs for instance seem to have been packed incredibly loosely in measuring them for the database, so all of my measurements are now far lower than they should be, and I cook with fresh herbs a lot!) or where a different listing in the database was better than the one I'd been using. Also, I've created some custom foods and I'd like to be able to go back and replace some items with my custom foods.

    Another reason I'd like a search feature is because sometimes I've entered something in the past where I've taken the time to choose carefully (e.g. weighing a portion &/or comparing different database items to select the best one), and would rather not duplicate this effort each time. Searching the database and copying & pasting would be much easier.

    One more use case for me would be when I can't remember when I last ate something and would like to find out. For instance there are some foods I aim to eat fairly regularly but not daily, or where I don't want to eat a particular food too often, and I want to check the last time I ate it so I can decide whether to eat it again.

    It would be even better if it could include a kind of "find and replace" feature, but I'd be very happy just to have a very basic search!

  • +1 for this feature please. All my reasons have already been mentioned by others.

  • This would be a REALLY GOOD feature for people who are trying to figure out food intolerances or IBS issues. Or even when was the last time they had beef, if they only want to eat it once a month. Or, when did they start taking a certain supplement?

  • Good news: We can now track in kilojoules instead of calories. Bad news: Still no ability to search the diary.

  • I've only been using Chronometer about four months but I would also like to see this feature. I've been very pleased with Cronometer overall but not being able to search for and copy past diary entries is a big (unnecessary) time waster for me.
    I was surprised when researching this issue that such a basic feature has been requested but unaddressed for years.

  • They're too busy developing new features nobody wants to do anything that everyone wants.

  • +1 for me, would love search, and also search and replace.

  • I'm new to Cronometer. Been using it for two months. I would like to add my vote for Cronometer adding the capability for searching user entered foods in the Diary. Seems strange that a database like this doesn't enable the user to search data that the user has entered for food, date, time of day, etc.

  • The more I think about it, the more I realize, that it is actually the main feature I need right now in my life. After years, I already know the nutritional value of things. What I still don't know is, what I can eat and what I can't. For that I need a way to search for foods I ate on specific dates.

    I decided to write a small iOS app myself, just for this one function. Just tired of / done with waiting.

  • that's awesome phreeskta, is there somewhere we could buy and/or access it? i'm sure the majority of users looking at this thread would be happy to know if this could be at least a temporary resolution to this.

  • I decided to write it, but haven't done it yet ;-)
    Will plan the whole thing next weekend or so, meaning what feature do I actually want / need. I didn't plan to upload it to the AppStore, but I might as well (as a free app).
    Here is not the place to write about it. I created a discord server for everyone that is interested in and wants maybe some specific feature, I should consider.
    https://discord.gg/Aw2rtmjvQD

  • Nice initiative! How are you getting the data out of Cronometer, give it doesn't have an API?

    Here is not the place to write about it

    ...why?

    Please consider writing in a searchable forum. Discord isn't indexed by Google.

  • Nice initiative! How are you getting the data out of Cronometer, give it doesn't have an API?

    I can't, so I won't. It will be just an app that solves this one problem. So as Cronometer user, we basically need to manually add all things, we put into Cronometer again (which sucks, I know). I am personally at a point, where figuring out, when I ate (took a supplement) something, is more important to me than getting nutritional info. That's why I will probably stop using Cronometer completely. The last months I used other tools (Journals), additionally to Cronometer, but I just couldn't figure out a workflow that worked for me. Furthermore, adding everything 2x is just annoying.

    ...why?

    In the end, it is a Cronometer forum, so I don't think it is appropriate to talk about other apps here.

    Please consider writing in a searchable forum. Discord isn't indexed by Google.

    You are right, it was just the first quick solution I had. I also just didn't want to make a big deal out of it. Like I said, I just need a solution for a problem, that doesn't exist yet (checked out the last weeks all other nutrition apps). Because I am a developer, I decided to write it for myself. I didn't plan to to put it on the app store and earn money with it etc.

  • edited January 2022

    how is this less work than Export -> open in Spreadsheet? which I can do on my desktop or any other computer; not just yet-another app on my phone?

    There's already a clunky, external solution. We want an integrated, easy to use solution. Export, open in Open Office or Excel takes 2 minutes.

  • how is this less work than Export -> open in Spreadsheet? which I can do on my desktop or any other computer; not just yet-another app on my phone?

    Probably much more work :-) That's why I said, it sucks.

    There's already a clunky, external solution.

    What is it? Where can I find it?

    We want an integrated, easy to use solution. Export, open in Open Office or Excel takes 2 minutes.

    Never used the excel export, so I didn't knew it even exist. But I guess, it can't be triggered from "outside", therefore it can't be important / synced automatically.

  • I'm in the diary when I want to search, so why do I want to trigger it externally? Export, click on downloaded csv file and spreadsheet launches with data.

  • I'm in the diary when I want to search, so why do I want to trigger it externally?

    If I wanted to use this data in an external app, it would be good, if one could trigger that export externally (with the app), instead of doing it manually. That was my thinking. Then, I wouldn't need an api anymore.

  • There's no benefit to an external app. The entire point is that search isn't integrated the way it should be

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